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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Home Maintenance and Repair Binder

I've been trying to decrease the amount of paper we save at home since most of our bills and other records can be accessed online whenever we want to see them. I don't keep any monthly bills or statements, but our filing cabinet was still full of stuff. Part of the problem is that we have both kept all our tax documents since forever. I know the experts say to keep 7 years, but I haven't pulled the trigger to shred them yet. I'll do it. But not today.

Another source of clutter in the filing cabinet was years of manuals and receipts from large (read:expensive) purchases we've made for the house, along with repair and maintenance documents. I wanted to keep these so when we sell the house we will know how old all the appliances are, but they weren't in any order and were just taking up space. So I whipped out my label maker and made a plan!

I bought a 3 inch 3-ring binder along with some folder tabs and clear sheet protectors.I made 2 sections - one for purchase and another for repairs/maintenance and started organizing.

It took a couple of hours to sort through everything, match receipts to manuals, and then organize everything into categories and sort by date. I know, #nerd. Some of the categories appear in both sections, like appliances, furniture, outdoor, and electronics, but the repairs/maintenance section also has HVAC (we had a problem unit for several years so we have many, many repair slips) and pest control to store the annual/quarterly inspection slips for termites/ants.

Now, if our dryer is acting up and I want to know the model number or warranty information, I know exactly where to go and find that info:

I purged enough papers so that everything fits in this binder, which neatly fits on our bookshelf rather than taking up half a drawer in the filing cabinet! WIN.